mother tree

[corvi]

Yesterday juli  and I went to an Artists' Garage Sale, where she convinced me to by some surplus Intensely Blue Paper being sold by a letterpress shop that I guess hadn't found a lot of use for All That Blueness Oh No So Blue.

I made a three-layer papercut. The layers don't actually match up very well, but I'm happy with it anyway, probably because all that Blue is affecting my cognitive function.  Need to solve the technical problem of how to transfer a design to multiple sheets. The answer is not "chalk dust," I have learned.

This is sort of the "mother tree" juli  and I half-glimpsed driving along Lake Baikal in Siberia in the middle of the night, racing to the Russian border before our visas expired. I didn't get a good look at it, just a quick impression of wind-twisted limbs almost hidden under dozens of blue silk prayer scarves. So I just make up what it looks like when I feel like depicting it.

The Mongolian language recognizes two separate colors, цэнхэр and хѳх, both described by the word "blue" in English, which I think is pretty neat. This one is хѳх.

For the past several months, I  have been working on convincing my brain that  "light blue" and "dark blue" are two separate colors, no more related than blue and green, the way a Mongolian would conceive of them. I'm very curious about how difficult this is, as an example of "language shapes thought," and how flexible brains are about that sort of thing.

Convincing Myself There Is No Such Color As Blue: I have weird hobbies.

Comments

[tylik]

It's also pretty common, linguistically. In Chinese the old word is qing*, meaning some kind of blue or green natural colors, and the newer words are lan and lu (with an umlaut). But they don't carry the sense of coolness than qing does. Like, if you're talking about a dragon, it'd definitately be a qing dragon, because hey, dragon.

* Aaaaah! This last upgrade messed up ibus, and now it isn't offerring me the right characters, WTF? Also, the character selection panel is popping up at the bottom left corner of the screen... This after ibus broke chromium.

[spiralsheep]

That's interesting, although dragons in Wales are more traditionally red, hee! And I probably should have mentioned that the Welsh word "glas" covers all the usually shades of water (and distant hills seen through changing weather) so it includes greys in those contexts too, although grey also has its own word (e.g. for animals and sometimes rock &c).

English is an odd language because despite having an extremely large potential choice of words, due to having shamelessly stolen so many from other languages, we don't have a monolexemic word for dark blue (blue originally meant lighter blue) while many languages do distinguish light and dark blues with a single word each.

[corvi]

Do you know about the blue / green situation in Kazakh?